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Monday, 10 September 2007 |
Is it good enough for a party that has spent its whole life in opposition dreaming the singular dream of an independent Scotland to produce an inaugural legislative programme as the first SNP-led government in the Scottish Parliament that lacks lustre and any big, blue-sky thinking? Here we have a party that has spent its whole existence blaming the ills of Scotland on parties dominated by Westminster and yet where are the radical plans to overhaul the country it has inherited? In opposition, the SNP members criticised Scotland’s record on everything from heart disease to housing. In its election manifesto it promised action on education, student debt and crime. Now they are in power, the SNP shouldn’t have to think twice about how to tackle scourges such as drug abuse, prison overcrowding, poverty or ill-health. The party members have had so long to ponder the whys and wherefores you would have thought they might have had some of the answers up their sleeve, ready with a blueprint for change. Those problems exist in the here and now so independence cannot be the catchall cure for these wrongs. So are we now faced with a party that has gone so far down the road in believing that as a minority administration it has to adopt the mantra of consensus that it is bending so far backwards it is in danger of falling over? Of course it needs to be cautious, it needs to prove its competence and it needs to quell fears that it will rush headlong into an irreversible state of independence, which at least half the population say that they find too scary a prospect right now. It needs to lay out its stall and show what it can do by being consensual but now is not the time for timidity because we are at a unique moment in political history, in terms of opportunity for the minority government to grasp the thistle. We have an opposition so bewildered and weak that it is just rolling over and letting anything happen to it. sources within the Labour ranks are whispering and wondering what the shadow parliamentary business managers are doing. Why is the SNP as a minority administration able to hog the debate? Why aren’t Labour, the Lib Dems or the Tories providing us with the much heralded alternative legislative agenda and why, when the SNP launched its White Paper on independence and invited us all to take part in a National Conversation, did the opposition parties do little more than engage in yaboo politics and refuse to take part in anything where the parameters are set by Alex Salmond? Civil servants in the Scottish Parliament were waiting with pens poised for the opposition parties to rush through the doors demanding that they should be able to use parliamentary procedures to launch their own debate. But the doors never burst open and the pens were put away. Here we also have an electorally defeated Labour group still talking of grief and shock. A party which pushed its leader into resignation and allowed a simple coronation of Wendy Alexander when few of them would actually admit an appetite for wanting her there. And a civil service headed by sir John Elvidge who describes the prospect of working with a minority administration as ‘fun’. Now is the time for the SNP to be radical, strike while the enemy is down, not offer a programme of compromise and bills that is simply a panacea to all parties and opens it up to accusations of being a policy pimp.
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Last Updated ( Monday, 10 September 2007 )
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Holyrood magazine is the fortnightly insiders guide to understanding the complexity of Scottish politics and policy developments and is widely regarded as being the leading publication for political news and information in Scotland.
